Video tour of our Impressionist to early Modern show of several years ago: Breaking the molds

Introducing Spaightwood Galleries

Spaightwood Galleries was founded in 1980 in Madison Wisconsin by Andy Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner and moved in 2004 into our beautiful site in Upton Massachusetts (about forty-five minutes west of Boston via the Mass Pike to Exit 11 (I-495 South) then exit at Exit 21-B Upton (the first exit south of the Pike); go 5.5 miles directly to the gallery in the former Upton Unitarian Church on the corner of Highway 140 and Maple Ave [click for views of our new home and exhibition space]). Now almost thirty-five years later we have an inventory of over 9000 works, most on paper, ranging from the late fifteenth century to the present. In the days to come we will continue to add pages (currently we have over 750) and illustrations (currently over 6000) to this site, but the best way to find out what we have will be to e-mail us (sptwd@verizon.net) or call us for more information (one of the reasons I retired after 35 years at the University of Wisconsin as a Professor of English and an Affiliated Professor of Law was to get caught up; one of the reasons Sonja retired after 28 years at Madison Area Technical College was to make sure I do). By clicking on the link for Recent Exhibitions, you can get a sense of the shows we have put on at the gallery since the end of 2000 when we launched this site. For those who find indexing by show a bit cumbersome to negotiate, we offer a start at a more comprehensive alphabetical listing, divided into artists born before 1800 and those born after. As usual, the presence of a link means you can click through to the image(s) or page(s); the absence of a link indicates that we have not yet photographed the work(s) of that artist in our inventory, but we would be happy to do so on request as time permits. Click for Artists listing. For a profile on Andy and Sonja, the co-owners of Spaightwood Galleries, click here.

Spaightwood usually presents between two to four shows a year. Most of our shows feature works by artists of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though we also have about 2000 old master prints and drawings in our inventory. In any given year, about 500 works of art appear on our walls. Our recent shows (see below) give a sense of the variety of what we show.

We are currently showing works by contemporary American artists (with a few transplants for good measure). We began our current show with the idea that we would put up a show of contemporary American artists and discovered that we had too many works to fit on the walls (and the floors) of our 4000 square foot viewing space, so we split the show into two parts, one featuring works of art by women, the other works by men, with a common core group of smaller pieces at the entry to the gallery (for a tour of the showstill in progressplease see the two Gallery Tour links above Gallery Tour 1 (not quite done yet) and Gallery Tour 2). The tour of the women's works from the first version of this show can be seen at Womanshow2014.

This two-part show followed an extensive show of works by Pierre Alechinsky, one of the founding members of the COBRA group (the name comes from the cities where the artists involved originally works: COpenhagen, BRussels, and Amsterdam) in 1948, the first winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Prize in 1977 (the Nobel Prize for artists, so to speak), and the Grand Prix National for Painting from the nation of France, his adopted home (Alechinsky represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and France at the Sao Paolo Biennale a few years later). Alechinsky has been recognized in recent years as one of the most significant living the artists. The art market has long noticed his stature: one of his paintings sold at auction about 25 years ago for over $2,000,000 back when a two-million dollar painting was a thing to be marvelled at. Alechinsky was just barely out of his teens when he burst onto the art scene as one of the original members of the COBRA group, and over the years he has emerged as one of the most imaginative and witty artists of our times. Alechinsky fans are everywhere. John Russell, who in 1986-87 devoted three separate columns in The New York Times to Alechinsky, saw him as "a man of strange blameless passions. Decorated invoices, worthless stock certificates, obsolete air-force navigational charts and ancient hand-written archival materials spark his imagination. . . . He has a taste for nature’s upheavals." Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist for whom "the garden is the center of the world," described Alechinsky as a man who "paints gardens. . . . He knows that the history of gardens is the history of all of us. . . . Alechinsky . . . chooses any of the forked paths of the manicured gardens at Blois or Hampton Court and then transforms them, ferociously, into the savage gardens of the primitive mind, the original unity of dream and awareness, reason and imagination, desire and reality." Indeed, it may be that it is his dream of recovering that lost unity that makes him, as The New York Times called him, "a poet of entanglement, [who] resolutely turns the emphasis away from himself, preferring to act rather as historian and referee than as autobiographer. . . . His touch is light, his thought rapid, his view of the world as sharp as it is benign. There is no better companion, and not many who keep us so consistently amused and are so generous with their findings." Alechinsky has had major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim Museum in NY, The Museum of Arts, Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (in 1977, the Year of the Snake), The Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Musées Royeaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Vile de Paris and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Boymans-von-Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, and museums in Aalborg, Brême, Copenhagen, Darmstadt, Des Moines, Düsseldorf, Gordes, Hanover, Marseille, Metz, Mexico City, Munich, St. Paul de Vence, Toronto, and Zurich.

This show immediately followed a show dealing with current events (even more current at the moment) devoted to pondering artists' views of war: "Studying war contained Goya's complete Disasters of War (80 mixed-media intaglios) plus plate 81, excluded from the original posthumous publication (the King of Spain protected Goya from the Inquisition by having Goya hand over all of the copper plates for the series and it was not published during his lifetime, but first appeared in 1863 in an edition published by the Real (i.e., Royal) Academia, to whom the King had given the plates in 1815. We have a complete set of the fourth edition, published by the Real Academía in 1906 in an edition of 275. Harris describes it as "excellently printed on very suitable papers" and says that "the impressions are generally a little inferior to those of the second edition but are better than those of the third." All editions published during the 19th and 20th centuries only contained the first 80 plates, but in 1958, the Real Academy published a members only edition of plate 81 in a very small edition for members of the Acadaemia: Fiero Monstruo! / Fierce monster! (pl. 81, Harris 201, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, & Julián Gállego, pp. 140-41, Delteil 200; Hofer translates the title as Proud Monster ). Original etching, drypoint, and burin, c. 1808-1814. A very good impression on Arches paper from a plate excluded from the early published editions (which only had 80 prints) and only editioned in the 20th century (though several trial proofs were printed c. 1870). Sánchez and Gállego suggest that this print sums up the entire series in presenting war as a " 'fierce monster' from a terrible nightmare, devouring humanity with dreadful violence" (p. 141). Our impression is from the first edition published by the Calcografia Nacional in 1958-59 with their seal in the lower left margin; it was presented to the Academicians of San Fernando, in whose possessions the plates remain. The edition was presumably small because a second edition was printed in 1959 in an edition of 110 with the sheets numbered in pencil. (You can see the image here.)

Other works in the show included George Grosz's 16 color lithographs from Ecce Homo (1923; the work was only published once because the Germany Army sued Grosz and won in court, putting a stop to possible future editions and destroying a number of Grosz' plates they found particularly objectional), 27 large mixed media intaglio's from George Rouault's Miserere et Guerre, which Rouault began in 1916, but which was not published until 1948 for obvious political reasons, and Otto Dix's 21 lithographs for the Gospel according to St. Matthew, in which Herod's troops wear SA uniforms, the Temple police wear SS helmets, and Jerusalem is depicted as a city of skyscrapers, those who live in it and mock Jesus wear the fashions of the 1920s and 1930s, and the guards ushering Jesus and his Cross to the Hill of Skulls wear slave-labor guards' clothes.

The show was also interested in exploring the ways in which stylistic revolutions occur. By the late 1860s, the art world had reached a kind of equilibrium between the Classicists (like Ingres), the Romantics (like Delacroix), and the Realists (like Corot). Students flocked to Paris to study with the masters at the schools, where they learned about drawing, color, and composition and mastered the kinds of subjects they would spend their lives working on. Each year at the annual Salon, artists would submit their works for judgment and the winners would receive medals and the commissions that would set their paths to success or keep them on it. Starting in the early 1870s, this well-regulated system began to fall apart, and over the next 60 years or so, the art world was completely transformed. The Impressionists, who were sometimes praised for their new ways of handling colors, were often mocked for their inability to draw. Their response was to start their own Salon, organized at first by Berthe Morisot, and seek their own audience among those willing to contemplate something off the beaten path. The Impressionists were followed by the Post-Impressionists, some like Seurat, Signac, Henri-Edmund Cross, trying to theorize new rules; others like Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Cezanne, bringing a psychological violence to the canvas, trying to remake their viewers. They in turn were succeeded by the Nabis or Prophets, who offered up visions of a brave new world or a braver ancient one, visions of pastoral landscapes like Bonnard’s lithographs for Daphnis and Chloe or Ker-Xavier Roussel’s pastorals of a world in which satyrs and nymphs wandered about in landscapes not unlike those of the French countryside or Vuillard’s depictions of people living within the quiet harmony of well-ordered interiors within the private worlds of their homes or walking through gardens in public spaces open only to those who had escaped the bustle of a busy modern world. Rejecting harmony, the Symbolists began exploring the realities beneath the surface of things. Also rejecting harmony, according to their critics, were the Fauves, the so-called "wild beasts" whose colors set the eye and mind at war with each other, revolutionaries like Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain, and by Rouault and Valadon, who did not exhibit with the Fauves, but whose works shared the violence of their coloristic vision. The advent of Cubism (here represented mostly by pochoirs by Fernand Léger and featuring a stunning watercolor by Nataliya Goncharova, whose paintings have begun breaking the $1,000,000 mark regularly with a high of almost $10,000,000) threw all artistic rules into question and the arrival of Surrealism (here in the person of early works by Picasso, Chagall, Miró, and Alberto Giacometti from the 1920s and ‘30s as well as a very surrealist watercolor by Lucien Coutaud and a dream vision Head of a Woman by Leonor Fini also done in watercolor) directly challenged the modes of thought and being (“I no longer think therefore I do not exist”?), completely rejecting the dominance of reason and logic of the waking world. Within the original prints and drawings of this show, we will present a visual tour of these many different ways of thinking about art and making art; where possible, especially in examples by Renoir, Morisot, and Cezanne, we will present several impressions of the same work to show how images change when an etching is printed over time and, in the case of Renoir and Rouault, variants of a work to show how artists can think their way through the process of moving from a first conception to a final one. We hope you will join us either in our gallery in Upton, itself a re-imagined exploration of visual space, or online, by browsing through the links on our website to the show.

2008 began with the end of our show of the Masters of Modernity, our largest show ever featuring a total of 179 works by Picasso (30), Matisse (33), Chagall (52), Kandinsky (10), and Miró (41), plus works by Braque (2), Klee, Leger (6), Giacometti (6), and Magritte. For selections from the show, see: The Figure / Artist and Model / Nature / Nature2 / People / People2 / People3 / Music and Dance / Biblical etchings / Chagall's Lithographs for the Bible / Chagall and Paris. Then for something completely different, in March of 2008 we began “Images of Women in Old Master Prints and Drawings / Images by Women in Old Master Prints." The show that wouldn't come off the walls finally came off the walls and the works that were in it are mostly back in their boxes. Our longest running exhibition was also our best selling show ever, but until mid-May 2009 it was time for 160 lithographs, etchings, and mixed media works by Marc Chagall. One of the most dominant artists of the 20th century, Chagall attempted to reshape the way we see and are seen. From his earliest paintings, depicting the ghettoized Russian Jews in their small villages not as prisoners but as free to explore the unknown world of their fantastic visions, to his last works, which meditate on the mysteries of love, artistic creation, and the joys of life, Chagall demonstrates the triumph of the imagination and celebrates its ability to free us from the constraints of daily life. Our current show will feature about 160 original etchings and lithographs dating from the time of Chagall’s return from the Soviet Union in 1922 to those executed close to the end of his extremely long and productive life. We feature a group of his early black and white etchings done at the instigation of Ambroise Vollard for Les Ames Mortes / The Dead Souls and The Fables, executed and printed in Paris from 1923 to 1927 for The Dead Souls (including one extremely rare hand-signed trial proof for one of The Dead Souls scenes) and between 1927-1930 for The Fables (including three hand-painted by Chagall) . In these works, Chagall says both farewell to Russia and hello to the technique of etching; the works vary between the loving if bittersweet emotions of his departure and his joyous discovery of his new medium. We are showing for the first time eleven 1948 etchings printed at the beginning of each chapter of The Dead Souls; these pieces, published in an edition of only 368 impressions, will be offered at the special introductory price of $1000 each until January 1, 2009. We are also including in the show the last page of the table of etchings from Les Ames Mortes which features a scene of Gogol reading a book while Chagall works at an easel on a portrait of Vollard, who commissioned the project but did not live to see it published for the first and only time in 1948. The show includes 36 of the etchings for The Dead Souls and 12 of The Fables, three of which were hand-painted by Chagall (edition 85) and one signed etching (edition 100) as well as 8 of the regular edition of two hundred which were neither signed nor hand-colored, 5 large-format color etchings done in 1957 for De Mauvais Sujets, and three larger-format pieces from later portfolios. The show also features groups of works illustrating the circus, his love affairs with Paris (including some lithographs he made in the 1952 and 1953 after his return from the U.S.), with lovers and artists, musicians, and dancers. Works dealing with Biblical themes represent a large portion of Chagall's oeuvre, and this year we will include 56 of them ranging from the etchings he did between 1930 to 1939 for Ambroise Vollard's proposed Biblemost printed in 1939 (including one gouache Chagall painted on one of the etchings as he worked out the color scheme for the hand-colored impressions to be included in the deluxe suite of etchings for the Bible; we also have available for viewing a few others which we could not fit onto the walls) but not published until 1956 after Chagall's flight from Europe and his postwar return; some completed and printed between 1952 and 1956. Also featured are selections from his sets of brilliantly colored lithographs for Verve in 1956 and 1960 (others not on the wall will be available for viewing), 8 works from his portfolio of large-format lithographs on the theme of the Exodus, and several out-of-series works). We will also be showing for the first time two tampon sec scratch lithographs published in an edition of 10 signed and numbered impressions plus several signed HC impressions, two of which are included in our show. Not included in the show but available for viewing are the complete set of five etchings done in 1926-27 for Maternité as well as four of the etchings done in 1977 to accompany a volume of writings on the Spanish Civil War by his friend, Nobel-Prize winner André Malraux, several additional etchings for the Bible and lithographs for the Bible, the complete set of color lithographs after Chagall's final designs for the stained-glass windows in Jerusalem featuring the twelve tribes of Israel, and many other lithographs done between 1956 and 1981.

2006 concluded with a one-person show devoted to the works of Joan Miró, now generally considered by critics to belong with Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall among the makers of modernity, in which we showed 100 original aquatints, drypoints, etchings, linocuts, and lithographs by the great Spanish Master. Preceding that, we presented a show of works by contemporary American Women artists, featuring works by Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and many others. Our first show of 2006 featured a large selection of works by Antoni Tapies, whom Robert Motherwell had described shortly before his own untimely demise, as the greatest living artist. In 2005, our first year in our wonderful new space, we experimented, trying out new ways of using our wonderful new large open walls. Our first Massachusetts show featured about 30 prints by Marc Chagall (most from his 1930-1939 Bible etchings and his 1956 color lithographs on the Bible), 10 drypoints by Mary Cassatt, 10 etchings and lithographs by Kathe Kollwitz, prints by Pierre Alechinsky, Antoni Tapies, Joan Miró, and Jules Olitski, monotypes by Jim Bird and Manel Lledos, drawings and paintings by Gerard Titus-Carmel, Manel Lledos, Claude Garache, and Lois Lane.

Prior to our move in November 2004, our very-well reviewed and ever-changing Farewell to Madison show was extended several times as work on the renovation of our new Upton space perhaps inevitably took longer than expected. It included a number of our favorite works and featured prints drawn from our recent acquisition of 100 lithographs and aquatints by Claude Garache as well as a number of recent important acquisitions, including works by Giulio Romano (an early allegorical red chalk drawing of Justice), the only artist Shakespeare ever mentions by name in one of his plays, Rembrandt (four etchings), Eva Gonzales, Manet's only pupil, who died in childbirth at a very early age (An actress with a mask; brush and black ink and wash with white gouache heightening and black chalk on tan wove paper; initialed in chalk upper right recto; signed or inscribed "Eva Gonzalès" verso), as well as recent acquisitions by Motherwell, Tàpies, Miró, Chagall, Alechinsky, and other favorites. For reviews from the Wisconsin State Journal, see here; for a review from The Capital Times, click here; for a farewell interview with former Cap Times Features editor and arts critic Jacob Stockinger, see here.

Preceding that we presented a celebration of the works of Joan Miró, including pochoirs from the early 1930s, his only linocut (from 1938), his first color lithographs, plus drypoints, etchings, aquatints, woodcuts, monoprints, and many other rare and beautiful original prints including a number of large-size lithographs and etchings (three feet x four feet or larger in frames). This show, the next to the last we presented in our Madison Wisconsin gallery before our move to Upton Massachusetts, followed a major 2003 exhibition of works by Marc Chagall, ranging from some of his earliest works (his etchings for Dead Souls, The Fables of LaFontaine, and The Bible, all commissioned by Ambroise Vollard in the 1920s) to a sample of his works in lithography and etchings from the 1950s to the early 1980s. It was preceded by a large selection of drawings ranging from the late fifteenth century to the present which followed our 80th-birthday salute to Antoni Tàpies, Antoni Tàpies at 80: A Retrospective of His Original Prints. Acclaimed by Robert Motherwell as the greatest living European artist, Tàpies’ prints have always been recognized as a major part of his oeuvre, and were celebrated in a retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 1991 that circulated to a number of museums in the US, Central and South America from 1991 to 1993. Our show included 90 original prints (our inventory includes more than twice as many as were in the show).

Keep scrolling down: more follows! (Be patientit's a long way down!)

Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.

120 Main Street, PO Box 1193, Upton MA 01568-6193

for questions, E-mail us at sptwd@verizon.net or call 1-800-809-3343 (508-529-2511 in Upton & vicinity).

The works fromAlbrecht Durer and the German Renaissance are back in their boxes and the interloper who loped into the place of our show of original prints (and a drawing) by Pierre Alechinsky in celebration of this year, the Year of the Snake in the Chinese calendar has also retreated back into its boxes (mostly). Our meditations on war and its effects by Goya, George Grosz, Georges Rouault, and Otto Dix can be visited in person or scanned by clicking here and here. (Our shows are getting more independent all the time: the Old Master Drawings show simply refused to come down for quite a long time: every time I thought I was ready to unframe everything and put them back in their storage boxes in the gallery, I would see something new (or buy something new!) and need to keep them up just a little bit longer (happily, you can still see them on our website beginning at www.spaightwoodgalleries.com/Pages/Old_Master_Drawings.html). Three of the drawings insisted on taking part in Albrecht Dürer and the German Renaissance, a show of works by Albrecht Dürer, his students, contemporaries, imitators, and copyists that included 120 woodcuts, engravings, and an etching by Dürer, 14 engravings after Dürer's works (including 6 by Marcantonio Raimondi, of the 33 we have from his engravings after Dürer's Small Woodcut Passion), 27 works by artists who were in his studio (3 woodcuts by Hans Schäufelein, 4 engravings by Georg Pencz and 20 engravings by Hans Sebald Beham), a work by Monogrammist W.S. (sometimes called Wolfgang Stuber) after Dürer's St. Jerome in His Study that substitutes Martin Luther for St. Jerome (according to the British Museum's website, it was may have been done to commemorate Luther's death in 1546), 2 woodcuts by Lucas Cranach, godfather to one of Luther's children (and vice versa), a hand-painted woodcut for one of Luther's translations of the Bible done by the Cranach School), 3 etchings by the Hopfer Family, father Daniel and sons Lambert and Hieronymus, who taught Dürer how to do etchings: a reverse copy by Hieronymus of Dürer's The Satyr and his Family, Lambert's Saul on the road to Damascus, and Daniel's large Crucifixion. We also showed three works associated with the court of Rudolph II, Aegidius Sadeler's Holy Family in a Landscape, based on a a Dürer watercolor that Rudolph owned, and Hendrik Goltzius's 1596 Resurrection from his Passion, in which he attempted to create a new "modern" style by drawing upon the two artists he thought incorporated the best of the past, Dürer and Lucas van Leyden, to form a new model for Northern artists in general and printmakers in particular in creating their own compositions. I'm still working on connecting all of the links, so keep tryingsooner or later, everything will be connected to everything else.

An interlude: in high school I focused on math, the sciences, and history, but my real obsessions were jazz, science fiction and fantasy, and books published by Grove Press (owned, though I didn't know it at the time, by Joan Mitchell's first husband); my reading, outside of required courses, tended to Samuel Beckett's plays and his first two novels. It was through Beckett that I first discovered Bram van Velde (Beckett wrote a short essay in a series on contempoprary artists published by Grove) and then Jean Dubuffet (same series). When I started my undergraudate career, I was a math major; 6 weeks later, I switched to English. I somehow talked myself into a James Joyce seminar as a freshman and read a lot of Melville and Hawthorne, discovering that I found the earlier writers ultimately more interesting. Fairly soon, I discovered 18th-century novels and plays and then 17th-century poetry and Shakespeare. I wrote my honor's thesis on metaphor in Donne's love poetry, and, in my last semester, as I was finishing my thesis, I took a Spenser course and it transformed my life. I went to Princeton to work with Tom Roche because I loved The Kindly Flame, his study of Book III of The Faerie Queene, and though I wrote my thesis on "Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry as a Protestant Poetic" and used The Old Arcadia as my example, I was hooked on Spenser and happily got to teach both undergraduate and graduate courses on Spenser regularly during my 35 years at the University of WisconsinMadison (both in the English Department and, additionally, for the last 8 years of my career, also as an Affiliate Professor of Law, codirector of the Project of Law and the Humanities, and co-editor of the Graven Images monograph series of Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred) published first by the UW Law School and then by the UW Press (co-edited by me and Len Kaplan, a colleague at the UW Law School, with my wife Sonja as Associate Editor). The same volume also containedmy essay on "Madness and the Limits of the Self in Shakespeare's King Lear." All of which is to say, our Dürer show was a long time coming!.

I had arrived in Princeton in 1966, the year Erwin Panofsky, who had long been at the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton, died, and found myself sampling all sorts of Panofsky events and fell in love with Panofsky's first love, Albrecht Dürer. Contemporary art had a new rival! Colin Eisler gave a lecture on Dürer (though I can't remember whether I saw it on campus or on Public TV) and his focus on Dürer's obsessive drawing and printmaking touched a sympathetic chord (my wife and friends would all agree that I am a fairly obsessive person). At Wisconsin, it soon became clear to me that I needed to learn a lot more about old master paintings and prints; my colleagues in the Art History Department at Wisconsin kindly allowed me to sit on on all of their Renaissance art history courses. Over the years, Professor Gail Geiger, our Italian Renaissance specialist, became a good friend and willing co-conspirator, and Jane Campbell Hutchison, a world-famous Dürer expert who was working on a biography of Dürer, since published by the Princeton University Press, taught me about Dürer and German Renaissance art and published an article about the reception history of Dürer's Melancholia for a volume on Madness, Melancholy, and the Limits of the Self in the Graven Images monograph series of Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred. published by the UW Law School and co-edited by me and a colleague at the UW Law School (with my wife Sonja as Associate Editor).

All of these currents come together through Panofsky's insights in the opening of his now classic-study (just canonized by a new edition with a new 18-page introduction by Professor Jeffrey Chipps Smith, that begins, "Erwin Panofsky was the most influential art historian of the twentieth century. . . . Panofsky's research [in Dürer] culminated in The Art and Life of Albrecht Dürer, a truly classic text for the study of art, and, indeed for the study of Renaissance culture" [p. xxvii]). Panofsky's introduction singles out Dürer as the single figure who enabled Germany to step forward into the world of art previously dominated by Italy, the Netherlands, and France: "It was by means of the graphic arts that Germany finally attained the rank of a Great Power in the domain of art, and this chiefly through the activity of one man, who, though famous as a painter, became an international figure only in his capacity of engraver and woodcut designer: Albrecht Dürer. His prints set a new standard for graphic perfection for more than a century and served as models for countless other prints, as well as paintings, sculptures, enamels, tapstries, plaques and faiences, and this not only in Germany, but also in Italy, in France, in the Low Countries, in Russia, in Spain, and indirectly even in Persia" (pp. 3-4). What made Dürer so different from his contemporaries, Panofsky suggests, was that he had a different conception of what an artist could be: "Agnes Frey thought that the man she had married was a painter in the late medieval sense, an honest craftsman who produced pictures as a tailor made coats and suits; but to her misfortune her husband discovered that art was both a divine gift and an intellectual achievement requiring humanistic learning, a knowledge of mathematics and the general attainments of a 'liberal culture' . . . . He loved the company of scholars and scientists, associated with bishops, patricians, noblemen, and princes on terms of almost perfect equality" (p. 7). Over the past few months, I have added new webpages devoted to many of Dürer's contemporaries and will continue working on them. Click here to begin the tour.

For much of 2011 and almost all of 2012, we showed Old Master Drawings from the late 15th Century to the 18th Century, including 158 works by, among others, Raphael, Giulio Romano (the only artist Shakespeare ever mentions by name), and Perino del Vaga, standing in for the early 16th-century Roman School and its offshoots. We also present a small group of Italian Mannerist drawings after Michelangelo or inspired by him, a drawing by Parmigianino, two drawings by Federico Zuccaro, and works by Giovanni Baglione, Baldassare Franceschini, and Il Morazzone (click here for illustrations). While there, you can also visit a beautiful red chalk drawing of a pastoral scene showing a woman and child asleep in a landscape attributed to Matteo Rosselli, who was Il Morazzone's teacher. The Venetian School is represented by two drawings by Andrea Schiavone, a very beautiful presentation drawing by Paolo Veronese, a double-sided drawing attributed to Veronese, one side of which shows Juno sitting on a cloud, the other side of which shows a man kneeling by a large urn. In addition to drawings from these schools or styles, we have a number of pieces showing the influence of Annibale Carracci, his brother Agostino (a drawing after Agostino's engraving after a painting by Veronese and a drawing drawn on the back of one of Agostino's etchings attributed to Odoardo Fialetti which takes the figure of Venus on the engraving and by tracing over it, uses it as the basis for a composition of his own), and their cousin Ludovico, and their assistants, Domenichino, Francesco Albani, and Giovanni Lanfranco, as well as works by their successors in and around Bologna, Guercino, Simone Cantarini, and Pier Francesco Mola. We also include a group of nine red chalk drawings that seem stylistically indebted to the Carracci (click here for a tour). Also included: 28 small drawings done in pen and brown ink by Ercole Bazzicluva (Pisa, 1610-after 1641, Florence) whom Baldinucci described (c. 1681) as "a brilliant draughtsman in pen and ink" and praised his drawings, which are mainly of subjects inspired by his experience of military occupations, hunts, and battles, as "highly accomplished." The later Italian group also includes drawings by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, called Lo Spagnuole, Etienne Parrocel, called Le Roman, and the ever popular Anonymous.

The Netherlandish contingent includes two late 15th-century drawings from a manuscript of the Golden Legend made for someone who did not believe that print had a future (and they may, alas, finally be right about that in our age of eBooks), a drawing from the first third of the 16th-century by Bernaert van Orley, one of the first generation of northern artists to go to Italy during the brief reign of Pope Adrian VI from January 1522 to September 1523; after his return he became court painter to Margaret of Austria, the Regent of the Netherlands, and spent a lot of time designing tapestries. We are also showing a drawing by Maarten de Vos, another visitor to Italy, where he spent some time in Rome before going to Venice, where he worked in Titian's studio before retuning to Antwerp. Once back in Antwerp, he provided over 1600 drawings to print publishers to be made into engravings and provided art for many of the churches that had been denuded during the iconoclastic partings during the 1560s and 50s. We are also showing a drawing by Abraham Bloemaert, another prodigious producer of drawings for prints and the founder of a dynasty of painters in Utrecht. The very prolific Peter Paul Rubens, who spent time in Italy as court painter to the Gonzaga court in Mantua and absorbed as much as he could of the art of the Italian Renaissance before retuning to the north, where he dominated painting for the rest of his life (as well as working for Philip II of Spain and Charles I of England, from whom he received a knighthood and other honors, also has a substantial presence in the show. We are showing one drawing by Rubens, two sketches by Rubens, and two larger works inspired by his work as well as two models of altar-pieces by artists influenced by him. We also have a signed drawing (a very rare animal indeed in an age when most artist did not sign their drawings), by Philipp Sadeler, one of the clan of Sadelers who were prolific engravers and print publishers. Jan, Raphael, and Aegidius Sadeler (Imperial printmaker to Rudolf II) left Antwerp during or after the sack of Antwerp and ended up in Venice. Although, alas, we do not have any drawings by Rembrandt, we do have one by his student Nicolaes Maes which is reproduced in the 10-volume Drawings of the Rembrandt School and another by one of his anonymous followers.

From Germany come drawings by Virgil Solis, Hans von Aachen, another of Rudolf II's court painters, and Johann Heinrich Roos. whose landscape paintings, drawings, and engravings made him the dominant figure in 17th-century German landscape art. We also have two hand-painted woodcuts, one after Hans Burgkmair and one after Lucas Cranach's woodcut portrait of Joshua for the Luther Bible. Perhaps the most interesting French drawings in the show are the twenty-one medium-size chalk drawings by Jean François de Neufforge, (Comblain-au-Pont, near Liège, 1714-1791, Paris). We obtained the group in 2004 from a Belgian specialist in rare books who had purchased a beautiful leather folio containing the drawings and offered them to us. According to an article by Claire Baines in the Grove Dictionary of Art (2000), 22: 925, Neufforge, an architect and sculptor, arrived in Paris around 1738 and studied engraving with Pierre Edmé Babel and architecture with Jacques-François Blondel. Although he worked primarily in the Rococo style, he was also interested in classical sculpture and was aware of his contemporaries, particularly François Boucher (1703-1770). Neufforge's great work was the Recueil élémentaire d'architecture containing roughly 900 architectural engravings, nearly all of which he both designed and engraved (published in several parts in 1757-68 and 1772-1780). According to Prof. Baines, "It is a traditional architect's pattern-book but is of unprecedented scope, containing virtually every type of civic and domestic building then known, including such structures as prisons and lighthouses that had only recently been considered worthy of an architect's attention. In addition, it covers such topics as interior decoration, gardens and methods of construction. In his designs for domestic architecture, Neufforge included models to suit every level of patron, from the most modest to the most aristocratic. The designs draw both on antiquity and the High Renaissance, and the Recueil was extensively used as a source-book throughout the late 18th century." Prof. Baines also suggests that his engraving style was formed while engraving plates for Julien-David Le Roy's book, Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (Paris, 1758), a work to which he may have been drawn by his interest in classical figures or from which he have become interested in classical figures (like Heraclitos, the weeping philosopher, whose imagined portrait he drew at least twice, once in black chalk and once in red, bordered as if for an engraving. Also part of the exhibition are a several drawings that show classical (Cicero) and contemporary orators which we have hung in couterpoint to a drawing of a Roman king and St. Peter, another famed orator (at least in the opening of the Acts of the Apostles). Also in the show are two groups of drawings by Neufforge, one of fashionable aristocratic women with pearls in their hair or around their necks paired with a coy nude and a woman in a mob cap and the other of which juxtaposes two drawings of a baby (we assume the Christ child) and one of what we think is a drawing similar to Durer's drawing of the figure who appears in his painting of the 12-year old Jesus teaching the elders in the temple along with two drawings of a modestly dressed young woman who would not be out of place in a traditional depiction of the Virgin Mary, either solo or in a group scene.

For more information and an introduction to the Renaissance art of drawings, please see the introductory page to our Old Master Drawings show.

Also featured in this show are "Paintings, Drawings, and Aquatints by Claude Garache" (French, b. 1929), who has been called the first post-modern artist of the nude yet who also embodies a kind of classic faith in the ability of the human body (specifically, the more "universal" human body of the woman) to convey important truths about the place of people in the universe.

Keep scrolling down: more follows!

The gallery seen from the corner of Main St. (Highway 140) and Maple Ave in Upton.

Wisdom Preaching to Fools (SMS 266.11, Strauss 13v, Hutt 1348, Borer 118). Original woodcut, 1494. A good impression on laid paper from a late 15th century or early 16th century edition showing almost no wear to the block on laid paper with no staining. Image size: 116x83mm. Price: $2500.

Albrecht Dürer (Nuremburg, 1471-1528), Agony in the Garden (Bartsch 4, Strauss 48). Original engraving, 1508. A fine Meder a/b impression with traces of burr printed on laid paper with part of a Bull's Head with Flower watermark (the 5-petal flower) not used after 1519. Meder notes that this watermark (#62), is found on first quality impressions only. Signed with the monogram and dated on the tablet lower right. Image size: 115x71mm. Price: $20,000.

Paolo Veronese (attributed), Juno and her peacock on a cloud seen from the rear. Brush and brown ink and wash on laid paper, c. 1570. Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Jacopo Tintoretto dominated the Venetian art scene for most of the 16th century, winning most of the public and religious commissions during that period. The Doges' Palace is particularly rich in work by Veronese. Hope, in Veronese and the Venetian Tradition of Allegory, talks about the distinct meanings of Juno in Venetian ceiling paintings in the 1560s-1580: Juno as Venice's patron (see pp. 409, 410); Juno as the element of air (Hope, pp. 415, 416), and Juno as one of the patrons of marriage (Hope, 419 and plate xxvii [b]). See also Pignatti and Pedrocco 1991, p. 111 (Juno clothed on a cloud with her peacock and a putto); p. 130: Juno, Hymen and Venus on a cloud in the Stanza dell'amor coniugale (in the Villa Barbaro at Maser, c. 1561-62?); p. 224, fig. 143d, Juno and Apollo in the Fontego dei Tedeschi in Venice; p. 230, pl. 149b, where the central figure in Infedeltà [Infidelity] (c. 1576-78) is a half-naked female figure seen from behind and below who shares much of the physicality of our drawing; p. 263, pl. 190, The Trionfo di Venezia in the Salo del Maggior Consilio in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice (1579-1582), in which the enthroned figure of Venice is attended by a number of figures, including a crowned female nude seated on a cloud seen from behind and below. Click here for another drawing on the verso with an unidentified collector's mark. Image size: 262x188mm. Price: $27,500.

School of the Carracci, 17th-century, Study of a Cherub. Red chalk drawing on heavy cream laid paper with no watermark. A study of the head and shoulders of a Cherub (it strikes us as too adult to be a little boy). The uneven trimming of the paper suggests that it might once have been a part of a larger composition and may signal that this collection was put together for the assistants in the workshop of an artist successful enough that he needed assistants. Image size: 120x80 mm. Price: $5000.

The Beast with Two Horns like a Lamb (Bartsch 74, Strauss 46, Meder 175). Original woodcut, c. 1496-97 for TheApocalypse. The work draws details from Revelation 13-14 (see below). Original woodcut from the 1511 Latin edition of The Apocalypse. A very good well-inked impression with strong contrasts, and preferable to the 1498 German and Latin editions which Meder describes (Strauss, p. 172) as "brownish, sometimes grey, less distinct" and "not particularly good." Our impression has full borders and margins on all sides. Strauss comments, "If a mystery can be made plausible, then Dürer has succeeded . . . in doing just that. He renders the incredible credible, retains the mysterious, and yet invites the viewers to interpret and understand what is happening. As a means to this end, he has invented a new graphic language" (p. 195). The image draws upon details from Revelations 17-19 (see below). Image size: 392x282mm. Price: $35,000.

Raphael Sanzio (Urbino 1483-1520 Rome), Attributed, Seated figure. Red chalk on old laid paper, c. 1504. Inscribed "Raphael 103" top center; initialed "J. F." in black ink lower left corner. Provenance: letter from Edward G. Hawks, a lawyer from Buffalo NY dated 12/25/1898 to James Dudley Hawks of Detroit MI, describing finding this and two other drawings loosely inserted in a 4-volume set of engravings of Herculaneum (Rome, 1789) with a note on the inside front cover, "Maria Denmanfrom her affectionate Brother [in-law] and Friend, John Flaxman." Flaxman (1755-1826) was a member of the Royal Academy, a successful sculptor and draftsman; he provided drawings to be engraved by artists (including William Blake) illustrating various texts including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the works of Aeschylus, and the Divine Comedy. Flaxman was in Rome from 1787 to 1794, where he would have had access to drawings by Raphael; Flaxman's own drawings, "unusual at the time for being conceived almost entirely in terms of outline," (Grove Dictionary of Art 11: 162-65; here at 163) might well have made Raphael's drawings of interest to him not just aesthetically but also practically. According to Hawks, he sent this drawing and two others (one of which, The Adoration of the Magi, here attributed to Parmigianino, which Hawks calls the "The wise man's offering," misreading the title written on the verso in Flaxman's hand, "The wise men's offering," we have also purchased) to his brother, "hoping they will afford you amusement and profit." Image size: 136x90mm. Price: call.

On our 27" monitor, this is about life size; for more on this drawing, please click here; for drawings by Raphael's assistants Giulio Romano and Perino del Vaga, please click their names.

The drawing seeems to relate to Raphael's drawings made at Pinturicchio's request (c. 1504) for him to use in his fresco cycle on the life of Pope Pius II in the Duomo in Siena (Vasari, II: 223 [Everyman edition]). In particular, see the 4th fresco, in which the future Pope Pius II, is sent by the Emperor Frederick III to Pope Eugenius IV. The fresco shows Aeneas Silvius kneeling in front of the Pope to kiss his slipper; on either side of the Pope there are five seated clerics wearing robes similar to those worn by the figure in our drawing. In an essay published in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, Bette Talvacchia uses Vasari's Life of Giulio Romano, Raphael's former chief assistant, to suggest what Raphael's workshop practise must have been like: "In assigning his assistants a more substantial role in the labor-intensive procedure of turning out hundreds of preparatory drawings for frescoes, Raphael initiated them into a rigorous working method, which they perpetuated as independent masters. The process devised by Raphael was to execute preliminary, rough sketches, proceed with further consideration of the groupings and individual figures through studies from life (often garzoni in appropriate poses), and then combine the compositional arrangements with the figural studies to form modelli" (p. 178). Our drawing seems to be just such a rough sketch (perhaps of one of the workshop assistants), to get the feel of a seated figure seen from the side. For a similar use of chalk to outline a figure, see Joannides 1983 #17, upper left. For the Pinturrichio frescoes, see either The Piccolomini Library in the Cathedral of Siena: The History of Pope Pius II in the Ten Frescoes of Pinturicchio (Siena, 1938) or Pietro Scarrpellini, Pintoricchio all Libreria Piccolomi (Milano: Fratelli Fabbri, 1965), p. 22. For additional seated cardinals in similar garb (though in different postures, see p. 38). For a reproduction of one of Raphael's cartoons, see Rhoda Eitel-Porter, ed. From Leonardo to Pollock: Master Drawings from the Morgan Library (NY: The Pierpont Morgan Library, 2006), pp. 26-27.

Guercino (Bologna, 1591-1666), attributed, St. Paul. Brown chalk drawing on laid paper with no watermark laid down upon a heavy sheet of laid paper with an irregularly-drawn decorated border, perhaps for mounting in an album. St. Paul sits at a desk, writing one of his epistles, the sword of his martyrdom leaning against the table upon which he works; an inkpot sits by his book within easy reach. The same sword is visible in Guercino's large 1644 oil painting of St. Paul in the Cuppini Collection in Verona (see David M. Stone, Guercino: cataloge completo die dipinti [Cantini 1991], n. 188 on p. 203). The elaborately-feathered quill pen that St. Paul uses seems to be, if not the same then at least very similar, although the treatment of the saint is different (in the painting he faces to the left at a 45 degree angle and is much more heavily bearded. David M. Stone, Guercino: Master Draftsman, suggests that most of Guercino's drawings should not be thought of as " 'blueprints' for the style of the paintings they study" but rather that they serve as "intellectual 'time-outs' in which the artist gives himself the freedom to invent, to delve into the istoria, without having to worry about such tedious issues as the size of the canvas, the number of figures he must eventually squeeze into the composition, or even the format of the picture, whether horizontal or vertical" (xxiii). Stone also suggests that the medium for the drawings was often based upon the need to use a technique that offered the most freedom and flexibility in putting images seen by the mind's eye onto the page, noting that Guercino's "preferred drawing medium throughout his life was pen or pen and wash" and his drawings show "the velocity with which Guercino could use his pen to 'attack' his subject on the sheet: the quick succession of pentimenti in the drawing would have been difficult if not impossible to realize in any other medium" (p. xix). Image size: 208x279mm. Price: $50,000.

Ercole Bazzicaluva (Pisa, 1610-after 1641, Florence), Beggar (inspired by Rembrandt?). Original pen and brown ink drawing, after 1630. Drawing on laid paper glued to a larger sheet of laid paper. Baldinucci described him (c. 1681) as "a brilliant draughtsman in pen and ink" and praised his drawings, which are mainly of subjects inspired by his experience of military occupations, hunts, and battles, as "highly accomplished." Image size: 57x73mm. Price: $1250.

The drawing is shown slightly larger than life.

Ercole Bazzicaluva (Pisa, 1610-after 1641, Florence), Antique warrior with two swords. Original pen and brown ink drawing, after 1630. Drawing on laid paper glued to a larger sheet of laid paper. Our drawings all came from one collection and may have been trimmed from larger compositions to form a library of poses for the workshop of some unknown artist, perhaps Bazzicaluva or one of his pupils. Image size: 63x34mm. Price: $1000.

The drawing is shown slightly larger than life.

School of the Carracci, 17th-century, Study of a young woman turned to the left. Red chalk drawing on heavy cream laid paper with no watermark. A study of the head of a beautiful young woman, caught in the act of turning to the left. For some suggestive similarities to this composition, see Annibale's Head of a young girl looking downwards in Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections (Ashmolean Museum, 1996), p. 104). The uneven trimming of the paper suggests that it might once have been a part of a larger composition and may signal that this collection was put together for the assistants in the workshop of an artist successful enough that he needed assistants. Image size: 106x92 mm. Price: $5000.

On my 27-inch monitor, this is about life-size.

Nicolaes Maes (Dordrecht 1634-1693 Amsterdam), The Prophet Nathan rebukes David. Pen and brown ink and wash on laid paper, c. 1650-1660. From the roof of his palace, David sees Bathsheba engaging in her ritual purification bath at the end of her period. He sends for her, seduces her, and she conceives a child. Her husband Uriah the Hittite, one of David's captains, comes home, but will not sleep with his wife while his comrades are in battle (and thus making it impossible for David's child to be passed off as his), so David orders Joab to set up a way of getting him killed in battle. After Uriah's death, David then marries Bathsheba. The situation depicted in this drawing is described in 2 Samuel 1-15. God sends the Prophet Nathan to call David back to obedience. Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who kills his neighbor's only lamb to feast a traveller even though he is rich and his many sheep of his own. David condemns the rich man to death only to have Nathan tell him, "You are the man! Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites" (7-9). Maes has illustrated the moment when David cowers in fear of the Lord's wrath and repents. Our drawing is illustrated in Walter Sumowski's Drawings of the Rembrandt School, 10 vols.(NY: Abaris Books, 1979-1992), vol. 8, p. 4298-99, catalogue n. 1922x. It has also been published in William W. Robinson, Rembrandt's Sketches of Historical Subjects (1987), p. 256, fig. 22. Image size: 102x160mm. Price: $18,500.

Although our 8000 square-foor ex-church has fantastic interior space, it does not have too much land attached it. One of the nicest bits, however, is a little garden space by the Maple Avenue side of the building. We knew from the beginning that it would make a perfect place to install our c. 10-ft high ceramic sculpture by Joan Gardy Artigas, son of Josep Llorens Artigas (whom Picasso called the greatest ceramic sculptor he had ever met). Llorens Artigas introduced Miró to the art dealers in Paris in the 1920s, suggested that they work together on ceramics big and little in the 1940s, and agreed when Miró said to his son, "You father bosses me around, so I'm going to boss you around when Joanet ("Little Joan," who actually is several inches taller than Miro, his godfather was). After about two years of working with his father and Miró, Joanet left Catalonia, went to Paris, opend a ceramics atelier (where his first two collaborators were Braque and Chagall), until Miró called him back home because his father was getting too old to put in the long hours that Miró wanted to work when Miró wanted to make ceramics. For the next 18 years, Miró and Joanet worked together whenever Miró needed to work (or play) with ceramics until ill health ended MIró's ceramic work (and shortly after, his life). While he was a visiting artist at the University of WisconsinMadison, Joanet stayed with us; when he left, he left 8 pieces with us. giving us a total of 10 altogether, until one winter c. 1991, we happened to be in Paris over the winter semester break and were having lunbch with Jean Frémon, the director of Galerie Lelong, who was complaining about the storage costs of a rather large piece that had come to the U.S. for an exhibition at the Meadows Museum of Spanish Art in Dallas (1984) and then tragelled to New York for an exhibition at the Hispanic Institute in New York City. Since then, it had been in storage and Jean began urgin us to try to sell it to the U.W. Art Museum, who, unfortunately had committed themselves to purchas a rather large sculpture by someone else. After explaining our failure, I told Jean that we would be happy to store it on our property in Madison, directly across the street from a park where George Segal's sculpture "Gay Liberation," had previously lived for several years. The next thing we knew, the head of the New York branch of Galerie Lelong was on the phone informing us that we needed to get the sculpture out of storage within the next week. Since it ws winter (still) there ws no way we could get it intalled until spring when the ground thawed wenough that we could have a 6-ft deed concrete platform installed to insure that it was tipped over by settling earth. We did manage to get it to Chicago and into storage until spring; we did manage to get it trucked up to Madison in May, and we did manage to get it unstalled in our front yard. And we were happy untill we were told we had to pay for the sculpture in the next three years. After some negotiations, we did manage to get the terms revised to 150 monthly payments and we were serenly happy until we fell in love and had to move the sculpture to Upton MA and have it installed once again. And here it rests until someone makes us an offer we cannot refuse. In the meantime, people tells us how much they enjoy stopping to look at it when ever they pass by and have a few minutes to pass some time with it.

Joan Gardy Artigas (b. 1938), Homage to Brancusi. Ceramic sculpture, 1983. Size: 280x100x110cm. This work was included in Artigas shows at the Meadows Museum in Dallas (1984) and the Hispanic Institute in NYC (1985). After a sojourn of nearly twelve years in Madison WI, this beautiful sculpture, nearly 10 feet high, has adjusted to her new home in Upton MA at the new Spaightwood Galleries. P.O.R.

Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.

To purchase, call us at 1-800-809-3343 (508-529-2511 in Upton MA & vicinity) or send an email to sptwd@verizon.net
We accept AmericanExpress, DiscoverCard, MasterCard, and Visa.
We also accept wire transfers and paypal.

For directions and visiting information, please call. We are, of course, always available over the web and by telephone (see above for contact information). Click the following for links to past shows and artists. For a visual tour of the gallery, please click here. For information about Andy Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner, please click here. For a list of special offers currently available, see Specials.

All works are sold with an unconditional guarantee of authenticity (as described in our website listing).

Visiting hours: Saturday and Sunday noon to 6 pm and other times by arrangement. Please call to confirm your visit. Browsers and guests are welcome.

Privacy Policy:

We do not share information with any third party except the bank that processes our credit card transactions. We do not keep credit card information on our computer.

A Note on Viruses:

Spaightwood Galleries uses only Macintosh equipment and operating systems and can neither catch nor pass on viruses aimed at Windows systems. Furthermore, we have a firewall and a virus checker and we're not afraid to use them.